Time management is a challenge for everyone but I’ve come across an approach that helps put things in perspective. It’s all about knowing your hourly rate and comparing everything you do to it so you can determine whether or not it’s worth your time or if you should find another, more efficient way of doing it.

Here’s the way it works. Say your goal is to make $200,000 this year. The number of working business days in 2015 is 251. If you assume a 10 hour day that means there is 2510 working hours in the year (Check out this website where you can play around the number of days and hours: http://www.calendar-12.com/working_days/2015). With that, you’re hourly rate ($200,000/2510) is roughly $80.

Now that you have your hourly rate you should compare everything you do to it by asking yourself – is this worth $80/hour or can I get someone/something else to do it for less so I can focus on what is? For example, how much time do you spend looking for contact information and/or researching accounts before you reach out to them? Say you spend, on average, at least one hour a day doing research and looking for contact information (which is a low estimate based on my experience watching what reps go through). That means you are spending over $1000/month of your own time on this activity. There are resources out here like www.salesloft.com, www.zoominfo.com, www.insideview.com, and www.gagein.com here you can spend between $10-$100/month to have this content at your fingertips and significantly reduce the time you spend on research and finding contact information. Even if you’re at a company that doesn’t invest in tools like this don’t you think it would be worth it to invest in a few yourself? I’ll take spending $100/month over wasting $1000 of my time any day of the week.

There are tons of different admin tasks you can and should outsource. It’s what the whole concept around the book “4 Hour Work Week” is based on. Here are a few more resources to leverage your time more effectively:

• FancyHands.com and www.33vincent.com (which is the one I use) – for all admin related tasks
• elance.com – Great for list cleanups and almost anything else you can think of
• mturk.com – if you can define a single task you need done over and over this is awesome
• hourlynerd.com – for when you need someone to do some high quality market research for you

Value your time. Good luck and happy selling.